Robert Louis Stevenson
Page 23
A former claim-owner said of Silverado that it housed over a thousand inhabitants at the peak of its use in the 1860s, but it is difficult to see how any very sizable settlement could have fitted on the site, a rocky platform approximately an acre in size, with a precipitous path down one side to where the old tollhouse used to stand, and a much longer, circuitous track that used to be accessible by horse and cart on the other. In the very few years between it being deserted and the Stevensons’ arrival, all the buildings except the assayer’s office and the forge had been knocked down or removed. The tunnel of the mine remained (Stevenson used it as a wine-cellar), and the railtrack that led from it to the chutes, along with a quantity of old winding gear and so much rubble that the newlywed squatters had to lay down planks and use the old wagon-rails in order to pick their way from the ‘house’ to the spring. Going for a walk was virtually out of the question, ‘the foot sank and slid, the boots were cut to pieces, among sharp, uneven, rolling stones’,3 so they stayed mostly on the platform, with its sunny aspect and wide views of the Napa valley far below.* It was here that Stevenson would lie naked taking his sunbaths, or sit by himself in the early morning, eating his breakfast of coffee and porridge and reading out-of-date Cornhills.
Their sojourn on the mountain was in two sections, the first lasting only six days. That was the point at which Fanny and Sam both came down with ‘mild diphtheria’ and had to be removed to a cottage in Calistoga. Stevenson’s two accounts of this, to his parents and to Fanny Sitwell (a rare letter to her at this date), vary interestingly; to Mrs Sitwell, he says the diphtheria was ‘slight, Sam’s especially, but Fanny has been pretty sick and a little lightheaded for forty-eight hours’; to his parents, he says that had they not been so prompt leaving Silverado ‘we might all have been dead, for though Sam was not very bad, and Fanny only had a slight case, yet he was pretty weak, and she was nearly three days more or less out of her head and quite unable to take any nourishment’.4 ‘We might all have been dead’ and ‘out of her head’ were part of the new heightened language with regard to health. From the date of Louis’s first blood-spitting in Oakland, the couple were on permanent red alert, hysterically sensitive to each other’s mortality.
The second stay at Silverado, a few weeks later, was undertaken in a more organised spirit. Joe Strong, Belle and Nellie Vandegrift (who had gone to live with the Strongs on her sister’s marriage) were all summoned from San Francisco; not only would they be good company and helpful in further emergencies, Joe was to make some drawings of the Silverado site for Louis’s proposed book. Belle’s reminiscences of the visit were of a charming outdoor bivouac, with campfires, delicious meals cooked by her mother, plenty of talk and drink. No one disturbed them, and they could do what they liked. Fanny recalled seeing her husband sitting on a rock one day wearing a nightgown, a shawl and her mushroom hat back-to-front, with the feather over his nose.
By the end of July the party had to break up: the claim on the mine lapsed while they were squatting there, and Rufe Hanson ‘jumped’ it (in an absurd transaction described by Stevenson in his book) for the sake of the scrap metal on the site and the water rights. Not that this forced the squatters to leave, but they had had enough anyway, and knew that none of their makeshift shelters would withstand the merest shower when the weather changed. Stevenson was also, somewhat to his surprise, suddenly very homesick for Scotland; ‘I suppose from perversity,’ he wrote to his parents,
because it is for once really rather a difficult thing to get home; and also because I want to see both of you after so long an absence – the longest we have ever had – and all the more because you have both been kinder to me this time than, it seems to me, all the sum of your former kindnesses would amount to. I have a very big heart when I think of it all; and I will say this: if you can love my wife, it will, I believe, make me love both her and you the better.5
He and Fanny determined to make the journey back to Britain as soon as he was well enough, staying in the meantime with Belle and Joe in San Francisco. Their longer-term plans were vague; to Fanny’s brother (still put out over the divorce and remarriage) Louis expressed the intention of coming back to California the next spring, but in fact they weren’t to set foot on North American soil again for another seven years. Thomas Stevenson offered to pay for everyone’s passage home first-class (Sam included), so the journey itself would be a luxurious respite from the shabbiness and discomforts of the preceding year. Louis was in excellent spirits at the thought of seeing ‘my dear old country and my dear old people’ again. Fanny, too, was relieved and happy. Belle recalled hearing a strange sound one day as she entered the hall of the Montgomery Avenue apartment: ‘with a catch at my heart, I realised it was the first time I had ever heard my mother laugh’.6
They set out from San Francisco on 29 July 1880, back across the plains by train to New York, where they boarded the liner City of Chester, reaching Liverpool on 17 August. The night before their arrival, Colvin decided, on a whim, to go and meet them off the boat, boarded the night mail for Liverpool, and was on the dock the next morning. He did not realise that Thomas and Margaret Stevenson were going to Liverpool too, so had an opportunity to observe the new family’s responses to each other. ‘The old folks put a most brave and most kind face on it indeed,’ he reported back to Henley; Sam was ‘not a bad boy’ and ‘distinguished himself [ … ] by devouring the most enormous luncheon that ever descended a mortal gullet’. Louis himself was harder to assess:
In the face looking better than I expected, and improved by his new teeth; but weak and easily fluttered, and so small you never saw, you could put your thumb and finger round his thigh. On the whole he didn’t seem to me a bit like a dying man in spite of everything. [ … ] When I had him alone talking in the smoking room it was quite exactly like old times; and it is clear enough that he likes his new estate so far all right, and is at peace in it; but whether you and I will ever get reconciled to the little determined brown face and white teeth and grizzling (for that’s what it’s up to) grizzling hair, which we are to see beside him in the future – that is another matter.7
The grizzling hair and the bride’s age seem to have bothered Colvin unduly, given the fact that his own beloved Mrs Sitwell had reached exactly the same time of life. Of the two Mrs Stevensons, Colvin thought Louis’s mother much the ‘fresher’. Margaret was indeed only eleven years older than Fanny, and had had many reservations about the match. ‘Doubtless she is not the daughter-in-law that I have always pictured to myself,’ she told one of her cousins.8 But this was before the two women had met. The brave faces that she and her husband put on the whole situation quickly relaxed into genuine warmth towards Fanny, whose self-contained, somewhat solemn, maternal manner was easy to accommodate, and whose watchful solicitude over Louis’s health so closely matched their own. Stevenson’s uncle George Balfour agreed, chuckling at his nephew, ‘I too married a besom and have never regretted it.’9
First at a spa in Strathpeffer, then at Heriot Row, everyone in the party was to be spoiled. ‘Wedding clothes’ were bought, enough for several weddings, holidays planned and presents made. Fanny was pleased to be ‘dressed properly and like a lady’ for once,10 even if she also had to indulge her mother-in-law ‘trying her own things upon me from jewellery to caps, just as a child plays with dolls’.11 Fanny tried to do the same to Louis, having discovered that his home wardrobes were packed with ‘every manner of garment that a man could possibly wear under any circumstances, and some too gorgeous to wear at all’, but found that he got bored after a while. Presumably the unworn glories were the result of his parents’ repeated attempts over the years to make him resemble a gentleman. Fanny felt – entirely erroneously – that Louis’s ‘tramp days’ were over.12 He felt that they were like the couple in Tennyson’s ‘The Lord of Burleigh’: ‘She married a beggar with no seat to his trousers; presto, behold, a gentleman with an elaborate wardrobe, herself arrayed in the most elaborate toilettes, and the world a kind o
f modified and painfully respectable Kermesse.’13
Coming home in 1880 had a sharp significance for Stevenson, for in his exile he had discovered himself to be a Scot. What began as acute homesickness in California expressed itself rhapsodically once he got to Strathpeffer in 1880: ‘Near here is a valley; birch woods, heather and a stream; I have lain down and died; no country, no place, was ever for a moment so delightful to my soul. And I have been a Scotchman all my life, and denied my native land!’14 A great more denying was going to go on, of course, because the ambient temperature of his Eden was rarely high enough for comfort, but the more obvious it became that he was unlikely to be able to live there permanently, the stronger Stevenson’s sentiments about Scotland became. The most interesting chapter in The Silverado Squatters, which he wrote in 1882, is that called ‘The Scot Abroad’, in which he emphasises the irrational and irresistible elements of these feelings:
When I am at home, I feel a man from Glasgow to be something like a rival, a man from Barra to be half a foreigner. Yet let us meet in some far country, and, whether we hail from the braes of Manor or the braes of Mar, some readymade affection joins us on the instant. It is not race. Look at us. One is Norse, one Celtic, and another Saxon. It is not community of tongue. We have it not among ourselves; and we have it almost to perfection, with English, or Irish, or American. It is no tie of faith, for we detest each other’s errors. And yet somewhere, deep down in the heart of each one of us, something yearns for the old land, and the old kindly people.
Of all the mysteries of the human heart, this is perhaps the most inscrutable. There is no special loveliness in that grey country, with its rainy, sea-bent archipelago; its fields of dark mountains; its unsightly places, black with coal; its treeless, sour, unfriendly-looking cornlands; its quaint, grey, castled city, where the bells clash of a Sunday, and the wind squalls, and the salt showers fly and beat. I do not even know if I desire to live there; but let me hear, in some far land, a kindred voice sing out, ‘O, why left I my hame?’ and it seems at once as if no beauty under the kind heavens, and no society of the wise and good, can repay me for my absence from my country. [ … ] There are no stars so lovely as Edinburgh street lamps. When I forget thee, Auld Reekie, may my right hand forget its cunning!15
Only a few weeks after arriving back in Scotland, Stevenson began planning an ambitious book on the history of the Act of Union between England and Scotland in 1707, encouraged by John Tulloch, editor of Fraser’s Magazine and Professor of Theology at St Andrews. Stevenson’s great Scots stories ‘Thrawn Janet’ and ‘The Merry Men’ belong to the following year, and Kidnapped, The Master of Ballantrae, Catriona and Weir of Hermiston to the coming decade. In a sense, he only became a writer of Scotland after this point in his life, when he gave up the idea of residing there.
The return home also, inevitably, necessitated a stocktaking of Louis’s immediate and long-term prospects. He had been writing professionally for seven years by this time, but his income was still far too low to support a wife and stepchild even if he had not been ill. The alarming attack of blood-spitting in California meant that full-time work was out of the question until he could be cured or his condition stabilise, and it seems that Thomas and Margaret Stevenson resigned themselves (with very good grace) to paying for whatever was necessary to put their boy right. Both George Balfour and Andrew Clark recommended ‘the Alpine cure’ for Louis, under the care of the lung specialist Dr Karl Ruedi at Davos in the extreme east of Switzerland. This was the most expensive and thoroughgoing treatment available to consumptives at the time, in a location, 5,200 feet above sea level and surrounded by pine forests, thought to have the purest and driest air of any health resort in the world. Perhaps the family consulted the Davos guidebook for that year, which described the benefits of the cure thus:
The effects of a residence at Davos cannot be overrated. The hollow chest fills out, narrow shoulders expand, the pale cheek or hectic bloom is replaced by the clear brown and red of robust health, and a year or two in this valley not only rescues the doomed from an early grave, but gives them the strength and vitality necessary for a career in life.16
Davos was also known as a centre for nervous invalids, which may have influenced Clark and Balfour’s unanimous recommendation. The 1880 guidebook goes on to emphasise the importance of repairing backbone as much as lungs:
Davos demands qualities the very opposite of the resigned sentimentalism in which too frequently the phthisical youth or maiden was encouraged. Here is no place for weak and despairing resignation; here you are not pusillanimously helped to die, but are required to enter into a hard struggle for life.17
So in late October, Louis and Fanny, Sam and Watty Woggs, the Skye terrier puppy given to them by Walter Simpson, set off slowly across the Continent to winter in the high Alps. The journey was long and demoralising, especially for Fanny, who may well have begun to wonder what she had let herself in for. In London for a fortnight, she found the fogs made her ill and the constant visits of Louis’s friends gave her headaches. But of course, everyone wanted to see Louis: it was his first contact with London literary society in fifteen months. At Henley’s house in Shepherd’s Bush and at the Grosvenor Hotel (where the invalid and his entourage were staying in great style), Fanny became more and more irritated with the ‘fiends slightly disguised as friends’, as she described them intemperately to her mother-in-law: ‘If we do not get away from London I shall become an embittered woman. It is not good for the mind, or the body either, to sit smiling until I feel like a hypocritical Cheshire cat, at Louis’s friends, talking stiff nothings with one and another in order to let Louis have a chance with the one he cares the most for, and all the time furtively watching the clock, and thirsting for their life’s blood because they stay so late.’18 Fanny was never one for understatement.
The couple’s fecklessness is evident in the way that, given access to money (Thomas Stevenson’s), neither of them had the least idea how to manage it, and they ran up such a huge bill at the Grosvenor Hotel that the generous sum allotted for the entire journey to Davos was gone in a twinkling. To complete the journey, Stevenson had to borrow from Colvin (against the 1878 loan, which Colvin had been paying back in small instalments), and write home for more. His new status as confirmed invalid had encouraged a regression into all the worst habits of dependence, and his winter at Davos was marked by lethargy and a degree of indolence not directly attributable to his physical condition, which became ‘unquestionably better’ there.19 Henley wrote a devastatingly forthright critique to Baxter of this change in his friend (in an attempt to mollify Baxter’s growing impatience with Louis’s business incompetence), saying he was ‘not morally so strong’ as he used to be: ‘His illness and his adventures together – and perhaps his marriage; I know not – seem, from what I can gather, to have a little sapped and weakened, and set up a process of degeneration in, his moral fibre. Thus, he has terrible fits of remorse and repentance; but he is lavish and thriftless all the same.’20
Baxter already loathed Fanny Stevenson, that much is clear. She was the subject of intense gossip between the group: Mrs Jenkin and Anna Henley, Katherine de Mattos and Grace Baxter all had strong opinions about the ‘schoolgirl of forty’ – in Henley’s rude phrase – whose lack of interest in pleasing them was obviously going to prise Louis away from his old friends. Henley took on the role of mediator, but he loved intrigue too much not to stir up more of it, and his reprimands to Baxter contain a winking complicity that did not bode well for the future:
Be as kind and as nice to Mrs Louis as ever you can. I have seen much of her, and I have modified a good deal. I like her some, and I can’t help pitying her much. My wife’s feeling is the same. So don’t let’s have any more of your abominable Baxterisms, my boy, or I shall lecture you.
I fear it’s a mistake, but if it be one it’s an irreparable; and we must strive with all our hearts and minds – with our hearts especially – to make the best of it.21
; Davos in 1880 was just beginning to burgeon from the small village it had been before the first tubercular patients came there in the mid-1860s to the super-sanatorium it resembled by the turn of the century, Mecca of the sick, the phthisical and winter-sporters alike. A post road had been built over the Fluela Pass in 1868, and slowly a few hotels began to appear among the scatter of houses, shops and churches. There was a Curhaus, but no sanatoria under direct medical supervision yet, and the invalids who had come in search of health lived in hotels and boarding houses. There was no railway, no electric light and only one road between Davos-Platz at one end of the valley and Davos-Dorf at the other, providing a rather dull but level walk for the ‘lungers’. The clientèle were mostly German and English, and it was to the sizeable ‘English’ hotel, the Belvedere, that the Stevensons went on 4 November 1880, having trailed through the valley of the Prattigau from Landquart to Davos by diligence. It was nine days before Louis’s thirtieth birthday.
Dr Ruedi’s diagnosis, after a series of thoroughgoing medical examinations, was that Stevenson had ‘chronic pneumonia, infiltration and a bronchitic tendency; also spleen enlarged’.22 Louis reported home, ‘I feel better, but variable. I see from this doctor’s report, that I have more actual disease than I supposed; but there seems little doubt of my recovery.’23 The wording indicates that Stevenson was undecided what to think about this most authoritative (and expensive) medical opinion of his life to date. Ruedi had effectively given him the opportunity to lay aside the label ‘consumptive’, but Stevenson was minded to hang on to it. He seems to have begun to ‘enjoy his symptoms’ in much the same way as the fictional Hans Castorp does in Thomas Mann’s classic novel of psychosoma, set in Davos, The Magic Mountain. Though the Davos that Mann satirised was a generation after Stevenson’s (the novel was written in 1927 but refers to the period around 1912), the consumptive mindset was essentially the same, with its resignation to fate and loss of will. By the middle of his first stay in the resort, Stevenson began to think it not worthwhile moving away for the summer, became fixated on his own fragility and the deaths of the young, and exhibited a perverse pride in the continuation of bad symptoms – all traits mirrored by Castorp in the novel.